Word: bloch
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...modernist Composer Ernest Bloch is resigned to the fact that he is quite an old man. He lives in semi-retirement at Agate Beach, Ore., gathering and polishing beach stones, gardening and caring for his mushrooms. He still composes regularly, but has unwrapped no major scores since his Concerto Symphonique three years ago. "I am no giant of a man like [78-year-old] Winston Churchill," he says...
...last week Manhattan heard a new chip off the old Bloch, his String Quartet No. 3. It had much of the modernist vigor audiences have come to expect from Ernest Bloch, but listeners also caught a new air of mellowness and reflection...
Part of the mellow effect came from the devoted performance by London's Griller Quartet, for which Bloch wrote the piece. It had its angry trills and thudding undertones, yet over the harshness always rode an affirmative melody. "It is quite natural that I do not react and feel and write as I did at 20, 30, 40, or 50-when I was young," says Bloch...
...Composer Bloch was uncertain about the reception of his quartet when the Grillers played it for him two months ago, but he need not have worried. The audience thoroughly approved, and the New York Times's Olin Downes called it the "strongest, the most concentrated [and the most] spiritually mature production of his lifetime." Bloch was not so sure: "I cannot say if it is my best quartet...
...prefer a turkey or a duck?" In any event, Bloch was not ready to let the quartet stand alone as the only testament of his 72nd year. After finishing the quartet (in April), he wrote Concerto Grosso No. 2 for Strings and String Quartet (August) a Sinfonia Breve (December) and a brief In Memoriam (also December). At week's end, with an energy that Churchill might applaud, he was off to Rome to hear a revival of his 1910 opera, Macbeth...